Poetry
El árbol del bien y del mal
Not translated into English
Medardo Ángel Silva · 1918
Synopsis
The only collection Medardo Ángel Silva published in his lifetime, in four parts, "Las voces inefables", "Estancias", "Libro de amor" and "Divagaciones sentimentales". Love, sadness, passing beauty and death return again and again; in the "Divagaciones", written in 1915 and 1916, the poet sets against the boredom of the city and its hollow, false life a soul like a lost skiff.
Context
The poet published the book at his own expense in Guayaquil in 1918, at twenty. Steeped in Rubén Darío and the French Symbolists, Verlaine and Baudelaire, he unfolds a poetry fascinated by death, rich in religious, funereal and twilight symbols. Gonzalo Zaldumbide published a selection, Poesías escogidas, in 1926, and the complete works appeared in 2004 from the Municipal Library of Guayaquil. The book has been translated neither into French nor into English.
Who it is for
For reading the only book of a poet of the beheaded generation, haunted by desire and by the end of all things.
Prizes and reception
In 2019, a hundred years after his passing, Fernando Balseca paid tribute to him in the journal Kipus and placed him within Ecuadorian modernismo.